If your GPA is 4.0 or above, you're not taking classes which are difficult enough. I graduated with a PhD in Chemistry, and my undergrad and post-grad GPAs were both weighted down slightly by purposely taking insanely difficult classes. Those people around me with 4.0 GPAs were more interested in that silly number than learning material, and wouldn't take certain classes if they didn't think they could get an A.

Actually, if your GPA is above 4.0, then it is fake. I can't run faster than the fastest person...even if I am the fastest person. The mere suggestion of such a thing makes it look silly and I have to discard it.

It is a big red flag, which would force me to go to the University and ask them for best score of everyone that took the same curriculum. Then I need to estimate what a perfect score would be. All of this defeats the purpose of a GPA.

I've never attended a school or college that recognized a grade point higher than 4.0. I've had teachers who'd write "A+" on something if they thought it was really outstanding, but it still got recorded as "4.0" when my grade was calculated.

I have yet to score better than 10.0 in the gymnastics floor exercise at the Olympics, or bowl a score higher than 300, either.

It's a damned 5 point scale you goob. They were introducing them when I was leaving high school and some schools have adopted them both at the secondary and post-secondary level.

Most grad students in the program I was in averaged around a 3.5 which according to the department head was about right. You should be getting Bs in grad school whether you want to or not. Really in grad school the arguments between As and Bs can get granular based on literally a fistful of points. I lost.2 GPA over what I calc

In my high school, AP (Advanced Placement) courses were on a 5 point scale, not a 4 point scale; A = 5, B=3.75, C=2.5, etc. So even with a couple of Bs over the years, As in 3 AP classes brought my high school GPA to 4.05 .

I just don't know how to average in those 'unsatisfactory' grades for handwriting & behavior from kindergarden and grade school.

AP courses in high school are basically a scam. I took a couple, and they were no harder than regular classes (though I did find it amusing, if not particularly meaningful, that I had a 4.2 in senior year of high school). When I was in high school, helicopter parents were always clamoring for more and more AP courses to artificially inflate their kids' grades. The most amusing suggestion I heard was an "AP PE" class--amusing, because the stereotype is that 4.0 kids aren't very physical...

You got fucked by your school. I went to UIUC, a highly regarded engineering school. I went in as a junior with 59 hours earned via AP tests. I then took easier class loads of 12-15 hours a semester and graduated in 3 years with no debt. AP is a great way of avoiding silly non-tech electives, and its cheaper timewise and cashwise than going to a community college for two years.

I'm going to throw out a bullshit here. Even at the most difficult of under graduate colleges you're still going to have people capable of maintaining a 4.0 throughout there college career while taking difficult courses. You're going to know multiple people with perfect SAT/ACT scores and you'll invariably know one or two who can pull off a 4.0 regardless of course load.

If your GPA is 4.0 or above, you're not taking classes which are difficult enough. I graduated with a PhD in Chemistry, and my undergrad and post-grad GPAs were both weighted down slightly by purposely taking insanely difficult classes. Those people around me with 4.0 GPAs were more interested in that silly number than learning material, and wouldn't take certain classes if they didn't think they could get an A.

Of course, at your school(s) YMMV.

I would have done better than 3.72 if it weren't for that ill-considered Piano I class.

Think about it - a programming student sitting at a keyboard, spending weeks trying to find the CTRL, ALT and SHIFT keys.

No, but I am a freak of nature and sometimes I wish I had a dozen tentacles in exchange for my legs...

ps six manuals, four octaves of pedals, two expression pedals, four different beat expression / pause switches (operated by knees and feet), and programmable (in a manner of speaking), layerable, instruments - from real pianos wired up and slung on stage to cymbals and drums to traditional pipes, all playing and layered together DIFFERENTLY on each manual.. at the end of a bar or other convenient point i ca

I still very vividly remember an article in the student newspaper from my undergraduate days (math bachelors in 1978, masters in 1980). The article listed the average grade given by each department. These ranged from a 3.6 from the department of education to around a 2.0 for both math and chemistry. All sorts of things go into this (e.g., every major had a math requirement and a lot of lucrative careers required taking more than a few chemistry classes to get the entry degree).but still an average grade

Then don't answer, jerk. I haven't been in a university classroom since 1995-- do I complain that the poll doesn't include options for my last performance review?
How does one translate "You are doing a really spectacular, awesome job and are savings the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and we are keeping you at the same pay rate with no cost of living adjustment" translate to the 4.0 scale?

It's a relatively irrelevant number that is assigned to you by the school system you attend. I chose under 2.0, because that's where I was 20 years ago.

I left college after a month because I worked in the computer lab, and had an epiphany - "Holy shit, I have 2 years of garbage classes to take before I start my 'computer classes' at the same level at these people. Oh hell no."

A GPA is mostly good for people who don't know what to do with their lives in High School, so they attend another school. The

Also, at my university, our GPA was out of 10. Something along the lines of A+ = 10, A = 9, A- = 8, B+ = 7, B = 6, C+ = 5, C= 4, D+ = 3, D = 2, E = 1, F = 0. The problem as I see it with the GPA (both systems, is that the marks aren't linear with the percentage mark. If you get a C mark which corresponds to 60%, you only get 4/10, So even a few bad marks can greatly reduce your GPA. If you get a B in every class, you end up with a 6.0 GPA out of 10, which most people would interpret as 60%, but your actu

Obvious option missing. For that ignored minority who doesn't belong to the Mighty US of A.
Isn't it enough that we allow resumes to be called CVs on slashdot even though nobody in the U.S. has ever called it a CV?

You wouldn't understand the local stuff because it's written in a language you don't speak. Also, the site's tagline is "News for Nerds, stuff that matters" instead of "News for American Nerds, stuff that matters to Americans".

calling them human is a bit much, there's at least a few billion bug people and then you have the indians (dot not feather) who are at best going to kindly ask you please sir to do their homework for them on stackoverflow.

Don't come to the UK (or many other civilised countries) because I think you've just committed a criminal offence here (under the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006).
Then again I'm guessing you don't get out of your trailer park often.

There was a poll in the past which shown that about 40% of readers weren't American, if I remember correctly. Sure, polls are not reliable, but still.
It would have been higher, but the rest of the world didn't vote because they felt the poll was American-centric. 40% was mostly just the Americans which chose the wrong answer.

Do they use A, B, C, D and F there? If so, then you can calculate it by A=4, B=3, C=2, D=2 and then multiply each grade by the credit hours and divide by total credit hours, or just use 1 as credit hours if it is High School (though some High Schools (ie Secondary Schools) have the concept of differing credit hours per subject).
Aside: My college used this same scale except everything was up 1. A=5, etc. Then they switched to a 4.0 scale.

This poll has the most obvious false answer rate of all Slashdot polls. Nearly half of the respondents are averaging 3.0 or more? This is just not credible or believable for this site. This is "News for Nerds", it's impossible for it to be this high.

We all know the actual Girls Per Annum rate here is somewhere between 0.1 and -1.

I graduated from my university over ten years ago, and even in my chosen major, GPA had very little impact on hiring.

Now, my GPA is meaningless as my hiring potential is based on my work experience and portfolio. Plus cumulative GPA going all the way back to elementary school, even if possible to calculate, only shows how good I was at being a student, not how good I am at learning, or how adept I will be in the workplace.

I'll second this. GPA has significance while you're in school, and perhaps when you are going for your first job after graduating. After that, your job performance and work experience are all anyone really looks at.

After that, your job performance and work experience are all anyone really looks at.

Until you apply for graduate school.

That's not entirely true either. It depends on whether you are jumping straight to grad school after undergrad, or are coming to grad school after years of work. Sure, if you're going straight to grad school after undergrad then GPA is going to be very important, just like the first job comment. But, the GRE/GMAT/MCAT/LSAT score is often more valuable if you've been out of school working for a few years and are planning to go back to grad school. Sure, they look at your undergrad transcripts, but more to se

I graduated from my university over ten years ago, and even in my chosen major, GPA had very little impact on hiring.

Now, my GPA is meaningless as my hiring potential is based on my work experience and portfolio. Plus cumulative GPA going all the way back to elementary school, even if possible to calculate, only shows how good I was at being a student, not how good I am at learning, or how adept I will be in the workplace.

Actually, GPA measures how well you do at being evaluated by academics in a program or in an overall sense. I know some piss-poor students that got good grades because they kissed up to the professor/teacher. They were dumb as rocks and could not apply the knowledge they had just "learned".

I am firmly in the missing option boat with "Who cares". The number only means something when you're in school, and even then it shouldn't because you should be polishing your own stone not trying to keep up with the Jone

There was no such thing as "Over 4.0," even if you took AP classes.
I think that in my school, you got something like.001 extra for AP classes, and I always felt like that was really dumb. How can you justify saying that someone got a 4.003 out of 4.000? It should have been enough to just grade them on the same scale and put the AP on their transcript. Essentially the AP classes covered the same material, just at a different time of day which I couldn't go to because of band.

I used to get grades from 0-100, which made far more sense than some arbitrary letter scheme, as all of my tests and papers were graded between 0 and 100. There's something of a mapping back to the letters there too, but it falls off at the end (65 is a D, with no D- as anything under 65 is failing).

I think in 100 years, everyone will break the 4.0 grade scale and some will be reaching for 9.0.
It is harmful to the egos of our precious little children that some of them would get less than 4.0 on the 4.0 scale, therefore everyone will receive 4.0 at a minimum on the 4.0 scale regardless of how well they perform. Also, to prevent hurt feelings, no one will receive higher than a 4.0 even if they do excellent quality work.

Because bell curves are and always have been an idiotic way to grade. If I'm hiring someone, I don't care how well they did in relation to their classmates. I care about whether or not they learned their material.

All told, my GPA in high school averaged out to just under 3.0. Getting my undergraduate degree, I netted an average 2.4 GPA.

As far as predictive performance metrics go, GPA is largely meaningless. It only seems to bear significance when there are no other suitable means by which to judge a candidate, or when candidates are being filtered by incompetent HR personnel.

When starting my career, I had trouble getting past the latter. My solution was to omit academic experience altogether from my resume and focus instead on private software projects and contract work. That did the trick.

Nowadays, I do list my degree, but do not include a GPA figure. Nobody's bothered to ask about it and they have no problem giving me money in exchange for engineering services.

An addendum regarding the meaninglessness of GPA as a performance metric: I'm speaking only from anecdotal evidence, which is of course just as good as hard data.
I consider myself to be pretty smart, but my GPA was only about 3.2 or thereabouts. I was in the top 13% GPA-wise, but I felt like I perform better than that. However, I didn't actually TRY very hard in college. I mostly pursued what I found interesting, and involved myself in leadership in IEEE and Tau Beta Pi (that is an Honor Society, not a fr

Never bothered looking at GPA when reading resumes. People like to flaunt their GPAs when it's over a 3.5, but I've seen far too many high 3s (with a "computer science" degree) that couldn't even tell me the difference between an array and a linked list.

The face-to-face interview was far more important. It was easy to weed bad candidates out, and a good pseudocode-writing assignment usually separated the silicon from the gold.

Given the demographics of this site, I think this should really be more of a log scale than the linear that we have now; I'd be much more interested to see how that "3.5-4.0" range breaks down than to see, as expected for a nerd site, that fewer and fewer people got mediocre of poor grades. My grades at the HS, AA, and BA levels were all in that range, yet I consider my HS grades (3.7) mediocre, my AA grades (4.0) stellar, and my BA grades (3.9) good enough.

A logarithmic scale [wikipedia.org], one where each unit on the axis jumps up a bigger (or smaller, depending on what direction you're going) amount than the last unit. So instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, each the same distance apart, you might have 1, 10, 100, 1000, each the same distance apart.

Or in the case I was thinking of for here, you could have:"Under 2.0" (spans the first half)"At least 2.0 but under 3.0" (spans the next quarter)"At least 3.0 but under 3.5" (spans the next eighth)"At least 3.5 but under 3.8" (spans the next

I was just like lots of you here; I excelled in high school because it was easy. Never did any homework, slept through class, and aced the tests. Next came undergrad: something I was horribly unprepared for. I panicked, started abusing certain substances to deal with anxiety, stopped going to class, and barely limped across the finish line to get a non-honours degree with a transcript pretty enough to use as toilet paper. Eight years and a fair bit of perspective later, I went back to school to get an MA. By this time I had figured out how to game the system and get top grades without really studying all that much. What's my point? GPA measures nothing except a) how easy the material is, or b) how hard you work, or c) how immature you are, or d) how much pot you're smoking, or e) none of the above.

In the working world, I prove my worth every single day by what I produce, and I think I'm pretty damn good at what I do. If my boss had asked to see my transcript in my interview, I wouldn't have had a chance in hell of getting this position.

Fuck GPA. I'm now in a position where I can review potential hires. Going to school at any level teaches you something about life (good and bad), and if you managed to graduate, then I'll judge you equally with the next guy or gal who graduated regardless of what school it was or what marks you may or may not have achieved. If the rest of your CV speaks to experience and creativity, then I'll give you an interview and see what kind of person you are. No way I'm judging you by your marks. There are just too many variables.

A class may have the same name and number on a transcript, but that class is completely different depending on who is teaching it.

Take for instance a math class. Some teachers allow notes, give extra credit for showing up, and extra credit on their tests. Yet other teachers do not allow any of that. In the former case a C+ effort can yield a B+, while the in the latter a B+ effort may only yield a C+. The second student may have even learned more than the first one, but the second student made the mistake of taking the harder teacher.

It's this reason students get on ratemyprofessor.com and systematically choose the easiest classes. If students take the harder teachers, even if they learn more, they're punished in their GPAs for doing so.

I recently received my pure math degree from UCSD with a cumulative GPA of 3.0 . After getting work that doesn't pay the best, I'm interested in attempting an engineering masters degree. Anyone with similar experience got any advice for a lowly failed mathematician?

The problem is that the standards and the GPA valuation has changed in the last 20 years. I've heard that the new limit is not 4.0 but higher than that, something akin to 6.0 being the max. So if I look at the standards set when I went to school I would have to say 3.5 or higher.

I have no idea what factors are used to determine GPA numbers today and what the highest number may be, so based on the poll today, I'd have to respond, "I transcend GPA".

Only 10 years? The last time I took a course that counted toward my GPA was in 1969. I've done some time since at trade schools, but they don't count. Unless my memory's worse than usual, the last one I took was in about 1980, so the whole question's meaningless for me. If I were looking for work, now, and a HR droid asked about my GPA, I'd have to respond that it's been so long that I've forgotten and that my work history should be allowed to speak for itself. Of course, being retired means I don't ha

No one is going to ask you about your GPA unless you are in academia.
I had several jobs (all IT related) within the first decade of graduation that concerned themselves with my GPA. Also, you can't always tell how concerned they were about GPA. They may not ask in your interview, but a lower GPA and you may have gotten weeded out before the interview. Who can say?